


the hungry cosmos

by Tridraconeus



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: (???), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Animal Abuse, Blood, Body Horror, Drug Abuse, F/M, Gen, The Void, csa mention, is it the outsider? who knows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 03:39:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11477841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tridraconeus/pseuds/Tridraconeus
Summary: Galia sighed and dragged fingers through her hair, greasy and moppish, trying to push it into some sort of an acceptable style. The best she got was out of her eyes and it probably stuck up in a hundred terrible cowlicks. It wasn’t as if she had to go to the Cat in the morning for work though, right?Galia had the sneaking suspicion that she wouldn’t be going much of anywhere anymore.





	the hungry cosmos

**Author's Note:**

> me: hey can i work on that cute spy thomas au fic  
> brain: no but you can write gory and disgusting void/galia fleet with weird obsessive undertones  
> me: great, thanks  
> So apparently those who have engaged in heretical witchcraft wander the Void until they are eventually devoured… if anybody understands this at all let me know because I sure don’t. I have a lot of feelings about Galia Fleet.

The last thing she remembered was Zhukov piercing her through the stomach and tossing her over the side, the burning heat of whatever festered in his boiling vat folding her into a last embrace. Now, she was somewhere entirely different; she cracked her eyes open. Galia was in a large, endless expanse of purple and blue and lying on a floating chunk of stone. Her clothes were bloody and dirty and when she placed a hand on her stomach, she felt twin entrance points. She reached around to her back, and felt where the blade had went clean through.  All in all, there was no way for her to have survived it. Survived him. She didn’t feel any pain from it, though. It was as if they were nothing but blemishes and not holes that pierced through her.

Galia sighed and dragged fingers through her hair, greasy and moppish, trying to push it into some sort of an acceptable style. The best she got was out of her eyes and it probably stuck up in a hundred terrible cowlicks. It wasn’t as if she had to go to the Cat in the morning for work though, right?

Galia had the sneaking suspicion that she wouldn’t be going much of anywhere anymore.

She cast her eyes around the expanse properly to see more floating chunks of stone that looked as if they’d been lifted out of Dunwall and placed haphazardly into the night sky. Experimentally, she called upon her borrowed powers. Surprisingly, they _worked_. Her feet landed solidly on a slab that housed a streetlamp. It looked like one of the ones out of Bottle Street. She missed the place, kind of. Missed the whiskey more likely. Now assured that she could harness the Void and transverse the geometries laid out for her, Galia moved on with a warmer sort of confidence. She left red bootprints on the stone and paid no mind. As she moved her way through, fluttering into ashes over and over again, the buzzing silence started to slowly fill. It was soft at first and more in her head and bones than anything else. As she got closer Galia recognized it as whalesong. One of the great beasts hung stationary in the air. It was a good enough distance away that she saw it as a challenge, and so Galia started to think of a way over onto the whale’s back.

It took her roughly a minute. There were chunks of stone floating everywhere, and if she managed to claw her way up onto the bell of a lamppost the whale was little more than a transversal and a prayer away. Mind duly made up, Galia began her trek. Something in her couldn’t believe that this was real and it gave her undue courage that normally she’d rely on a bottle for. Once, she undershot and clung onto a ledge with her fingernails until she could get properly up. It did nothing to dissuade her. It made her heart beat harder in her chest, and when she looked down a fresh gush of red stained her coat and dribbled down her stomach, her thighs, over her boots. She still felt nothing but a dull tingle and the wet pump of blood.

_You know the layout. Think of where you want to be, and it will be so_. Galia breathed in, closed her eyes, and leapt off of the lamppost. It was a leap of faith in all ways, and her faith was so rewarded by her boots making contact with the smooth, rubbery skin of the thing. She’d gotten where she wanted to go, and now faced the yawning emptiness of the Void. Plus a whale, still singing. Galia felt it in her bones, an itch she had to scratch. What did she expect? A sense of accomplishment? She’d made it through the obstacle course, she’d reached the end of the relay only to find herself without a partner. She scoffed, shook her head, and looked down at the broad striped back underneath her.

“Don’t imagine you could give me much advice.” She felt ridiculous. Taking a whale as a conversation partner! Not as weird as some of the stuff she’d done completely drunk, but a new low for her while sober. She laughed. It caused a thick clot of blood to slide out of one of the holes and drip down onto the whale’s back _. Disgusting_. Anger welled up inside of her again where it had been temporarily soothed by the challenge of making her way to the whale, and in lieu of a proper target she turned it upon the whale.

“Well? Are you going to say something?” The song rose and fell. Not what she wanted. Did she even want a reply? “Zhukov wanted one of your bones. He had me kill someone for it. Said something about magic.”

Her hand fell to her hip and the short Whaler’s blade sheathed there. It came out in a soft whisper of steel and laid familiar in her hand. “Personally, I think it’s all a load of shit. Just got glowy oil, that’s all.” She maneuvered the blade until she held it in both hands, raised over the whales’ back. Her lip curled, voice dropped into a throaty and leering register. “If you got magic, now’d be a good time to show me.”

She drove the blade into the great beasts' back. It lowed, a terrible sound of pain that tugged on her heart. It was easy enough to push the doubt aside and call upon more rage instead. She'd been doing that her whole life. Galia pushed further, shoulders and arms working as she pressed the blade in to the hilt. The beast hung in the Void and it couldn’t escape her-- it couldn’t flicker away like she could. It couldn’t disappear. Not like _Daud_.

“You’re just a beast. You’re trapped here, just like me.” She hissed it. Voice low, and seething, and hot anger welled up and overflowed in the same way that her midsection leaked blood down onto the whale.

Purple and black flickered in the corner of her vision, and she twisted her head to the side to look out. The Void rose around her in tendrils like a thousand winged serpents. Galia stood, letting go of the blade. Her fingers dragged on the hilt, the cloth binding of it, before she finally straightened up.

Was this the Outsider? She’d never heard much beyond vague and fearful descriptions, she’d never gone asking. The entity itself did not interest her as much as its power, which she’d always felt secondhand; through Daud, through Zhukov. It was still an addictive rush. She’d gone chasing it, too. All her chasing? Her dedicated fighting, her obedience to Daud and then Zhukov? It led her _here_.

“Come on, then!” She spread her arms wide, staring down the writhing blackness in front of her. “Take me! Take me like you took Daud!” _He has to be dead,_ that’s what she thinks. Has to be. When the Bond severed, it left her an alcoholic for years, chasing that high. Damn if she didn't feel some righteous anger for that, no matter how much of it was entirely her fault in the end. “Like you'll take  _Zhukov_!” 

Her voice rose into a raw howl. There was nothing graceful, nothing glorious about her; the new Whalers were nothing but a pale shadow of what she’d had before. Her red coat ended up redder with her own blood. Now she was here, in the Void, not entirely sure what was happening or what would happen to her. Blood welled up from the blade in the whale's back. Galia felt it through her boots-- she stepped forwards, less of an acceptance and more of a dare. The Whaler who trained her always did say she ran into danger like an enraged Blood Ox. 

He died at the point of a sword, struggling against the toll of a music box. It was better than what happened to those who survived. Galia’d choked on her own vomit welling up in her mask before she crawled under a pallet and hid. And then Billie—and then whiskey—and then Zhukov.

And now this.   
A reaching tendril of shadow wrapped around her wrist, all the way up to her elbow. It didn’t feel threatening, but Galia stepped away still. Another joined the other, mirroring it on her other wrist. Her feet settled squarely on a pale tan stripe that ran down the whales’ side and she leaned to look back at the knot of shadow. It was, as she should have guessed, impassive. She acutely missed her own mask. The dark stuff of it slid down her body, wrapped around her neck like a noose and around her waist like a nobleman at a ball. Two of them pierced through her stomach, the holes there, came out the other side and she saw them waving in front of her and then disappearing into the fabric of her red coat. Into her skin. She expected pain. Anything that went through her body like that should _hurt_ and that it didn’t felt deeply, fundamentally wrong.

The aim of it all solidified when the shadows started moving her around. Galia felt like little more than a puppet. She could move. She could tear away. She didn’t, and let them guide her movements. It started simple, just a little sway as the ones around her wrists rose and fell. The one circling her hips pushed and pulled, an irresistible tide that left her little more to do than follow along.

She turned with them. Lydia’s face, senile and smiling, rose to her mind. The Void knew. It knew how she’d killed her and now it was toying with her, turning her in gentle twist. And she’d just _let_ it. This was, of all things, a trap of her own design.  

_She’s moonstruck, and hallucinating wildly on the floor of the slaughterhouse. The Empress hasn’t woken up yet, she hasn’t demanded her dues from Zhukov. That has to be it. It’s either that or the Abbey’s swill of heretics tortured in the Void for all eternity is true, and she’d never put much stock in the chatter of zealots._

Galia tipped her head back to try and look above the wrapping of shadow around her. She saw a pinprick of violet, but it was pale and far away. Her mentor in the Whalers had been a nobleman’s son, in his youth-- and then a plaything for his father’s associates; he’d taught her the lulling, lilting movements of a dance when they both were softened with brandy and white leaf tobacco. Her boots moved in the same pattern now.

A tendril drifted across her cheek in a mockery of a caress, the same way Zhukov’s hand—the leather of his glove, more like, cold as a corpse in the sweltering heat of the slaughterhouse—had when he’d put the knife through her gut. It was as soft as silk. The rest of the shadows curled and twisted around her and into a soft, dark cocoon that she did nothing to fight. The whalesong rose up from the beast and her boots tamped on its rubbery skin. She stepped back and felt the give of the Void around her. Blood dripped from her wounds onto the shadows.

“Is this it?” She tilted her head, fingers wrapping tentatively around the silky darkness flowing around her. “Is that all?”

A ridiculous idea came to mind. Against her better efforts, Galia smiled. “Are you keeping me company?”

Perhaps she was mistaken. Likely, even. The warm cocoon of shadows tightened and flowed up and out, funneled in reverse, and Galia’s eyes followed in something close to reverence. How soppy. Rinaldo would be amused, dark eyes glittering as he’d run a hand through close-cropped curls.

_Showing your soft side, sweetness? How come I never got any of that?_

_Choffer._

The shadows coiled over each other and then rocketed back down towards her. They rushed over her and for a single breathless second Galia felt it flowing through her veins. This was what she’d wanted. Not a taunting and slow dance, not the scraps of power she’d been thrown, but the whole breadth of the Void bundled up and coursing through her. Her smile widened to a grin.

It was over as soon as it started, though, and just as one day she’d woken up to a chill and soberness that hurt the shadows pulled from her and she was bent in two with the force of it. It felt awful, a body hollowed out, and Galia whimpered lowly in pain. Her belly burned in a pain she should have felt long ago and as her hands went to the ache, they came away hot and wet with the blood that had kept dutifully leaking out of her.  

“No!” Galia lurched after the retreating, disintegrating shadows and thrust her hand forwards into the coiling knot of them. It went straight through, and the shadows kept moving back. She followed. “Don’t you dare!”

Her foot nearly slid right over the ledge and she paused, stretched out as far as she could over the yawning maw of the Void. The whale kept lowing beneath her. “Don’t leave me alone!”

There would be nothing if they left, just the expanse of the Void and the miserable beast under her feet and her own blood endlessly flowing. She couldn’t stand the thought of that. It would be just like the years she lost to the bottle, but now even more of her own making; no disappeared mentor to blame it on. With a snap decision and a hot flash of desperation, Galia made her choice. She rocked back, bent her knees, and leapt forwards into the shadows.

Nothing. A terrifying lurch into the darkness, suddenly as incorporeal as smoke, and she plummeted through pitch black for what seemed to be an hour until she appeared, chilled to the bone, on the floating chunk of stone she’d woken up on.

Galia stumbled back, entire body shaking and thrumming like an arc mine. She dropped to her knees, the stones’ coldness seeping through the tough leather of her uniform. Her hands found the ground, and she screamed.


End file.
